Philip Raisor

Philip Raisor has published eight books, most recently the full-length collection of poetry, That Naked Country (2019), and the chapbooks, In the Instant After (2018) and Early Morning Koffee Klatch at the Egg ‘n Hash Sitdown (2019). Outside Shooter: A Memoir (2003) and Headhunting and Other Sports Poems (2014) were influenced by the Civil Rights and Anti-War Movements of the 1960s. His collection, Swimming in the Shallow End (2013), was nominated for the Poet’s Prize, and Hoosiers the Poems (2013) won the Palooka Press Chapbook Prize. His edited volume of essays on W. D. Snodgrass was published in 1999. Raisor’s literary work has appeared in Southern Review, Sewanee Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Aethlon, Chautauqua, Poet Lore, The Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. His essays on Shelley, Browning, Joyce, and Faulkner have been published in numerous scholarly journals. He has taught at Louisiana State, Valparaiso, Kent State, and Old Dominion University, and now lives in Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Works

2019

That Naked Country

SUMMARY: A roadside sign marks the spot where two young men who purportedly betrayed the aims of the American revolution defended themselves, but were hanged by purported patriots in 1774. Overwhelmed by his own imagining of what happened there, a current adventurer decides to track down other signs and voices from the past in order to understand his own position in current America’s march toward social revolution. Pulled by external forces toward action, hesitant to commit, sympathetic but cautious, he hears the voices of success and failure, learns what the spirit of revolution feels like. He, like so many around him, enters the fray, backs off, leaps forward. In the end, he stands alone, his choice made, knowing what is on both sides of the barricade.